RoboCamps

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At Robot Obedience School, students tame roguerobots, turning them into obedient robots, and we have great fun doing it!

Our students teach their robots to be obedient by drawing diagrams that form graphical programs. Programs are the foundation of the modern world, and are a crucially important skill for the next generation of innovators that our nation needs.

Our RoboCamp is designed to introduce new students to the LEGO® MINDSTORMS® EV3® environment. The RoboCamp runs for four days.

Prerequisites

Students must be able to use a desktop computer independently, and be able to work the file browser to locate files.

Students, Build your Robot

Students will be issued a LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 for the course duration. Students will start off by building their own robot! Instructions are provided for this exercise. MINDSTORMS is constructed using the LEGO Technic construction style, which is quite different from the bricks with studs building style that younger children are used to. LEGO Technic uses beams with pin holes, axles and gears to create drive trains. There are also electronic elements which are connected to the programmable brain!

Beginning Programming

Students will bring their robots to life by programming them to behave autonomously! Students learn to program quickly in the EV3-G graphical programming language. We may do things like

Bump around the floor

Follow lines on the floor

Play tunes

Solve mazes

Robot platooning

Students will learn about the following elements of the EV3-G Programming Language:

Controlling motors

Loops

Reacting to sensors

Using wires and doing computations

Feedback systems

Writing subroutines (MyBlocks)

Building Challenge

Students who have mastered the basics of programming will demand something more challenging. We offer building challenges to develop building skills. Students will use their kit of parts to design and build their own robots to meet a challenge.

Students gain experience with the modern LEGO® Technic® building, and once they have built their robot, they must program it in EV3-G to make it behave obediently.

Students learn that robots built to look like Dr Seuss' drawings don't actually stand up - structural integrity is very important. We talk about the number of degrees of freedom of a mechanism. We learn that using triangles make things stronger. Gear trains must be designed with the correct gear ratios. There must be ways to initialise the position of moving parts.